by Don Hynes
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| Vantage Point | Culture and Politics by Don Hynes |
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"No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing, knowing it to be wrong.
He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is not so,
the prejudice will be gone." - Tom Paine
November 10, 2003 What Big Teeth You Have Little Red Riding Hood had a hard time telling grandma from the wolf and although the story gives a bad rap to wildness the tale provides a wonderful analogy for the cultural pretense of today. The big bad wolf had eaten grandma by posing as her beloved grandchild and seduces little Red Riding Hood by feigning a disguise as granny. As the story goes, both are eaten but the wolf falls asleep from his meal and a woodsman saves the day by cutting open the body of the wolf, rescuing both granny and Red Riding Hood. He replaces their bodies with stones and sews up the sleeping wolf, who dies upon awakening from the insupportable weight in his belly. Carl Jung once opined that naiveté toward evil was the most dangerous aspect of the western psyche, having seen the affect of that naiveté first hand in himself and Europe during the rise of Hitler and the forces of fascism and communism. The weakness Jung described is not so much centered in the inability to see evil in another, but to find it in oneself, a failure against the biblical inscription to find the beam in one’s own eye before the mote in another’s. The determination to posit evil as an external force alone could be said to be the surest expression of evil itself, and it is this “force” which is on the rise through fundamentalism and its governmental allies world wide. Hate and intolerance are its expression, self-righteousness, condemnation and militarism its embodiment. President Bush began his “evil doer” narration after the tragedy of 9/11, overlooking his family’s financing of fascism during the 1930s and 40s, including his grandfather Prescott Bush’s directorate of the Silesian Consolidated Steel Corporation in Poland that used Jewish slave labor during Bush’s corporate tenure through 1942. This history isn’t the President’s personal responsibility, but his persistent rhetoric about “evil doers” in Islam ignores the skeleton’s in his own family closet, and is in linguistic form a deliberate or unconscious repetition of the abusive prejudice that eventually led to genocide in Germany. History is never the point for the intolerant. It was the right wing in America under President Regan and his Falwell / Gingrich alliance who demanded military support in money and weapons for the Afghani "freedom fighters", the fabled “mujahidin” who were going to fight Regan’s war against the “evil empire,” a Soviet Union largely concocted by the inept foreign intelligence of George Bush Sr.’s CIA B Team composed ironically of the same players who later created the myth of Sadaam’s WMD, the “mujahidin” who would turn back like a snake twenty years later and bring down the Twin Towers in New York City. Today in Afghanistan the horribly repressive Taliban are reported to be recruiting thousands in the wake of recurring failure of an abysmal U.S. foreign policy and the resultant social chaos. The last large scale debacle of American ambition, the war against Vietnam, shadows every U.S. step in Iraq, although mention of Vietnam is deliberately ignored by the Administration, yet events like the Tiger Force massacre of civilians continue to come to light without acknowledging the insanely untenable position of soldiers in a war where they are uniformed targets but their “enemy” is woven into the fabric and culture of the country they’ve been ordered to occupy. When the Ayotollah described America as the great Satan it seemed ludicrous, grotesque, but now we have Paul Bremer, termed Ambassador to Iraq rather than Director of Occupation which is his real job, returning the Ayotollah’s favor with this recent address to the Iraqi people which sounds like a woven parody of President Bush’s “evil doer” rhetoric with U.S. cavalry truce offers to Native Americans before rubbing them out. If that seems like a stretch, note that the U.S. carried out bombing missions against two towns in Iraq yesterday where U.S. military “suspected” insurgents “might” be hiding. The moral certainty President Bush shares with Osama bin Laden and other Muslim fanatics, along with Ariel Sharon and the Israeli ultra-right despite the growing opposition within top leadership of the Israeli military, is supported across a political spectrum in the U.S. that includes alliances with the most conservative and often homophobic elements of every church, including Catholic as in born again crusader Fr. John McCloskey of the ultraconservative Opus Dei, with an unenlightened and delusional intolerance whose destructive effectiveness we’ve only begun to witness. As fundamentalism, and fundamentalism’s global corporate partners continue to profit by polarizing the world with fear and condemnatory attacks, furthering militarism against “evil doers” from sacrosanct positions of supposed good even when opportunities for peace are presented, the effect of our foreign policy becomes an increasing portrait of grief for those who are caught in the growing global conflagration of the self-righteous. Down is Up as Art Form "Bush says attacks are reflection of U.S. gains" was the presidential spin de jour prior to a week when 32 Americans and an uncounted number of Iraqis were killed in the violence of an occupation that is beginning to include more open U.S. attacks upon the civilian population by a military force that cannot cope with guerrilla war. Robert Fisk likens the insurgency to Algeria and despite Occupation Authority denials, the brutality and lack of security are affecting critical NGO’s like the Red Cross who pulled out of Baghdad and Basra this week. The Red Cross is a particular loss for the Iraqis, having been the only effective means for common citizens to track family members being held prisoner, now numbered in the thousands, without formal charges or due process by U.S. forces. Senator Robert Byrd described U.S. policy in Iraq as a high price for hollow victory in a speech before a Senate abandoned by all but six members in the vote on the President’s war budget request: “Before us today is a massive $87 billion supplemental appropriations package that commits this nation to a long and costly occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, and yet the collective wisdom of the House and Senate appropriations conference that produced it was little more than a shadow play, choreographed to stifle dissent and rubber stamp the President's request. Perhaps this take-no-prisoners approach is how the President and his advisers define victory, but I fear they are fixated on the muscle of the politics instead of the wisdom of the policy. The fact of the matter is, when it comes to policy, the Iraq supplemental is a monument to failure.” I find it sad yet inspiring that a lone 86 year old man had the courage to stand up and defiantly shout no in the Senate to a funding request that was clearly opposed by a majority of Americans. Following a Presidential speech on democracy that was largely regarded as a sham in the mid-East and on the eve of President Bush’s planned visit to England, new and serious evidence came to light on the fabricated nature of his and Prime Minister Blair’s case for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq. Jessica Lynch recently condemned the Pentagon version of her “story” and exemplified some genuine heroic character by honestly stating “she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun had jammed during the chaos. ‘I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do,’ she said. 'I did not shoot - not a round, nothing. I went down praying to my knees - that's the last thing I remember.’ ” Despite the increasing number of casualties the President continues to ignore the dead and wounded in campaign fundraising appearances and references to the war. The families of the dead don’t have the privilege of presidential insulation and are speaking out with a voice that cannot be challenged. The veterans who return are marked forever, externally and internally, and although it’s inevitable, their sacrifice should not be the subject for gain within the liars club that would profit by their loss. In an eloquent essay on the eve of Veterans Day, William Rivers Pitt writes on sacrifice and the sense of justice it should compel: “It was recently revealed that Saddam Hussein essentially surrendered on the eve of the war, throwing his country open to American forces in whatever capacity the Bush administration felt was necessary to guarantee that Iraq was not a threat. The Bush administration spurned this offer and rolled out the blitzkrieg, beginning a process that has killed hundreds of American soldiers, wounded thousands more, and consigned tens of thousands of civilians to die in the dust. Veteran's Day is upon us. A just world would see a long parade of veterans wending its way past the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, past the Korean War Memorial, past every statue and plaque commemorating the service, and that full measure of devotion, given to this nation by men and women beyond number. In a just world, the parade would halt on the ground that, someday, will bear the names of the men and women who have died, and will die, in this Iraq war.” Ways to Help Listen to the artists’ voices, like Kate Power in her new song Travis John about her Portland neighbor killed in Iraq. Here are a few words I wrote for Kate and her partner Steve Einhorn: War ruptures the fabric of life, hemorrhages the connective tissue between human beings, creating wastelands in the earth and coffin filled fields that were meant for other harvest. The shamans of old peered through the veiled mist that separates the worlds of then and now, carrying our supplications to the forces beyond and returning with a song or poem or image that convey the timeless to us in this time-bound world of finality and separation, a voice from beyond the pale, where ghosts “young and full of promise” speak from wisdom not clouded by advantage or boundary, redemptive beyond nation or politic. The prayers we offer and the messages we receive wash with grief, inspiring our souls to allow our deepest humanness to open and be healed. When these songs are heard ambition is silenced. We glimpse our place in the larger scheme, in the compassion of the creative womb from which we are born and ultimately return. “Travis John” bears this voice and vision, and we would do well to hear the music and all it intends, that our dreams be once again rooted in the oldest soil, rich with the knowledge of forgiving. Peace. *** |
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